{"id":14297,"date":"2009-10-16T10:00:45","date_gmt":"2009-10-16T15:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=14297"},"modified":"2012-10-14T01:56:32","modified_gmt":"2012-10-14T06:56:32","slug":"are-more-women-marrying-younger-men-yes-but","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2009\/10\/16\/are-more-women-marrying-younger-men-yes-but\/","title":{"rendered":"Are More Women Marrying Younger Men? Yes, But…"},"content":{"rendered":"

This last week\u00a0New York Times<\/a><\/em> suggesting that older woman\/younger man relationships were on the rise.\u00a0 But I wouldn’t get too excited just yet.\u00a0 The data below shows that the percentage of men marrying women ten and especially five years younger\u00a0is decreasing and the percentage of women marrying men ten and especially five years younger is increasing.<\/p>\n

\"Capture1\"<\/p>\n

It all looks very dramatic until you check out the y axis.\u00a0 Notice that the y axis for the “husband older” graph is zero to 35%, but the y axis for the “wife older” graph is zero to 10%.\u00a0 This makes the data for men look more impressive than it is.\u00a0 Not that 8 or 10 percentage points is insignificant, but it would be far\u00a0less impressive on a zero to 100 scale.\u00a0 The data for the women, especially sitting right next to the “husband older” table, look far <\/em>more impressive than it is.<\/p>\n

Only about 6% of women are marrying men five years younger or more.\u00a0 That’s a two percentage point increase since 1960.\u00a0 Not exactly a cougar revolution.\u00a0 One in four men are still marrying women five years younger or more.\u00a0 And, though it appears that they’re\u00a0not marrying women five years\u00a0younger or more as frequently, the age distribution of the remaining 69% of marriages is left invisible and most of them probably involve women that are somewhat younger than their husbands.<\/p>\n

So, yes, today women are more likely to marry younger men\u00a0than they were in 1960.\u00a0 But the presentation of the data (the inconsistency in the y axis) makes the degree of difference seem larger than it is.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Lisa Wade is a\u00a0professor of sociology at Occidental College<\/a>. You can follow her on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This last week\u00a0New York Times suggesting that older woman\/younger man relationships were on the rise.\u00a0 But I wouldn’t get too excited just yet.\u00a0 The data below shows that the percentage of men marrying women ten and especially five years younger\u00a0is decreasing and the percentage of women marrying men ten and especially five years younger is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[55,2102,2088,253,272,274],"class_list":["post-14297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gender","tag-gender-history","tag-gender-marriagefamily","tag-history","tag-marriagefamily","tag-methodsuse-of-data"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14297"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14303,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14297\/revisions\/14303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}